Action at a distance.

This week James Bradley, author of Flags of our Fathers, wrote in the New York Times that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was Theodore [yes, you read that right: Theodore] Roosevelt’s fault. TR probably would have hugged to his flabby bullet-scarred chest the notion that he could start wars twenty-three years after his death. But let us attempt to take this case seriously.
In 1905 Roosevelt recognized Japan’s annexation of Korea in return for Japanese recognition of U.S. possession of the Philippines. He did so through an executive agreement, negotiated by his envoy William Howard Taft with Prime Minister Katsura Taro. Walter LaFeber writes in The Clash,

This executive agreement, one of the first important such agreements made by a president on his own, avoided possible embarrassing ratification debates in the U.S. Senate. The agreement was also sealed in secrecy. The Taft-Katsura deal was not known publicly until the historian Tyler Dennett discovered Taft’s memorandum in the Roosevelt Papers nearly twenty years later. The United States, the first Western nation to recognize Korea in 1882, became—at Japan’s request, which Roosevelt immediately met—the first nation to withdraw its diplomats from Korea in 1905. (86)

Bradley writes that in permitting Japan to have Korea, Roosevelt “emboldened them to increase their military might — and their imperial ambitions. In December 1941, the consequence of Theodore Roosevelt’s recklessness would become clear to those few who knew of the secret dealings.”

Sadao Asada points out what should have been obvious to Bradley and the editors of the New York Times: “Bradley entirely ignores and skips the course of real Japanese aggression from the Manchurian Incident of 1931 to Japan’s advance to southern Indochina in 1941.” Of course: there was plenty of policy and policy change in both the US and Japan between 1905 and 1941. But more, “In my view (shared by many of my Japanese colleagues and most of American specialists in TR’s diplomacy), the Taft-Katsura Agreement was a part of TR’s ‘realistic’ policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with Japan based on his sphere-of-influence policy and balance-of-power considerations.”

Right. Bradley thinks that Roosevelt did Japan’s bidding because he was reckless, or foolish, or acting as “an agent” of Japan. He quotes Roosevelt saying in 1900, apparently naïvely, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” Bradley does not quote Roosevelt saying why: “She will be a check upon Russia.”1 As Asada says, Roosevelt was thinking in balance-of-power terms.

He was also thinking, as Asada says, in realistic terms. Roosevelt told John Hay in 1903, “We can not possibly interfere for the Koreans against Japan … [because] they could not strike one blow in their own defense.” More, he said, “It was out of the question to suppose … that any other nation, with no interest of its own at stake, would do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves.”2

Which suggests another problem with Bradley’s interpretation: what should Roosevelt have done? In 1905, the US had 108,000 men in uniform, as against Japan’s 250,000. The most recent experience of U.S. mobilization for war, in 1898, had not inspired confidence—rather, it inspired a resolve to reform the military that in 1905 had only just begun.

Indeed much of Roosevelt’s thinking about Japan took place amid an awareness of American military weakness in Asia. War Plan Orange, drafted in 1906, ceded the indefensibility of the Philippines. LaFeber again:

Roosevelt now found himself back with Lincoln and Seward: the nation’s [i.e., the USA’s] open-door interests in China and Manchuria had to be protected by cooperative diplomatic and military efforts with allies, not by the world’s second-greatest fleet, which lacked the power to act unilaterally in Asia. (90)

Bradley is certain Roosevelt “was acting as an agent [of Japan] — it’s in his own handwriting.” He’s relying on a letter from Roosevelt to his son saying, “I acted in the first place on Japan’s suggestion … . Remember that you are to let no one know that in this matter of the peace negotiations I have acted at the request of Japan and that each step has been taken with Japan’s foreknowledge, and not merely with her approval but with her expressed desire.” Even if we read this as an admission that he acted as an agent of Japan, we should also note that Roosevelt said lots of other things about why he did what he did, so there’s no necessary reason to seize on this one. After all, as Kipling famously said of Roosevelt, he was a persuasive and compulsive “spinner.” He liked to tell stories, especially amusing and provocative ones. Which means one shouldn’t take any one of his pronouncements too seriously—as Kate Beaton knows:

Sometimes you should pretend not to hear Mr. President, especially if you’re trying to craft a serious interpretation of American history.

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19 comments

I’ve been avoiding commenting on this since I saw the HNN interview because I really should be doing something more productive this week. The presumption that Roosevelt doing something more aggressive with regard to Japan’s claims in Korea and elsewhere wouldn’t have produced the Pacific War sooner seems unlikely to me. The combination of US expansion in the Pacific (Hawaii as well as the Philippines) and anti-Japanese/anti-immigrant racism was already leading some Japanese to consider the US a likely competitor and enemy in the near future: an intransigent or pro-Russian Roosevelt would have failed to negotiate the Portsmouth treaty (against which the Japanese people rioted anyway, because there was no indemnity payment) and the US would likely have been unable to integrate Japan into the Wilsonian treaties of the ’20s, and the military would have been even more likely to move aggressively in China and the Pacific sooner than 1931.

From both sides, the US and Japanese, it’s hard to see what Roosevelt could have done differently, even assuming that he had the ahistorical inclination to do so that would have produced a better result.

The impression I got from Kaigun was that the Japanese happened on America as an enemy not so much out of any genuine geopolitical conflict, but as an unfortunate reification of the choice (shortly after smacking down the Russian navy) to use the USN as the hypothetical foe to design its fleet against.

TF Smith: Nobody intervened on the side of the Chinese, ever. Even the “Open Door policy” was pretty much a dead letter from the beginning. That’s why the Japanese thought they could get away with so much: the 21 Demands make it very clear the direction things are going to go, unless the Chinese can get their acts together quickly (which they didn’t). This is part of what made FDR’s intervention on their behalf so infuriating: it was out of character with the 19th century paradigm, and nobody had ever made a League of Nations decision the foundation of a diplomatic relationship (there was an attempt with the Italy/Ethiopia thing, but it didn’t stick).

Richard J,

I hate to disagree with Mark Peattie, but I think a reasonable reading of his other books (and anything by Iriye) suggests that there’s very little hypothetical about the tensions between the US and Japan in the Pacific. There was a great deal of frustration, actually, within both the miiitary and civilian nationalist communities, with the Naval Treaty presumptions of Japanese inferiority to US power, concern about the US becoming an Asian power at a time when Japan was finally “coming into its own” as an Asian power, anger over blatantly racist US restrictions on Japanese immigration and immigrants (starting right after the R-J war with the SF School Incident)

The US routinely developed war plans in the event of Japanese attack. Canadian attack, too, so I don’t know if it tells you much.

Seriously, though, there was a discourse of competition with Japan in the US as well, concern about rising Japanese influence when the US was finally “coming into its own” as a Pacific and imperialist power, relief that the Naval Treaties fixed Japanese forces at a level below the US, disappointment that the “Special Relationship” (what a charming name for a sphere of influence!) with China wasn’t respected by other powers including Japan. The discussion was about how TR could have affected Japanese attitudes towards aggression, but there was plenty of aggression on the US side as well.

Many years ago George Kennan in one of his Walgreen Lectures made the very interesting point that the US entry into WWII may have been very different if not for McKinley’s “Open Door” policy. His basic critique of said policy could be termed, “the idea that the legalistic-moralistic tradition of the United States accounted for adventures in imperialism without commensurate understanding of the burdens or responsibilities of empire by most Americans and some policymakers”. That piece has the advantage of not only be better reasoned than Mr Bradley’s, but has TR making a (I should think highly uncharacteristic) statement, “We can not possibly interfere for the Koreans against Japan … [because] they could not strike one blow in their own defense” supporting Kennan’s view.